What is the best time of day to write your story?

And what if you have no time?

You may wonder to yourself, at what time of day should I sit down to write my story? Should you write in the morning when you first wake up, before you get too tired from a long day of work? Or maybe after a workout or walk in the park, when your mind feels alive and is racing with adrenaline and inspiration.

The simple answer that you will most often hear is that you should find a time that works best for you and stick with it. But that really is a simple answer. It is easier to make a plan than stick to it. Maybe it is better to look at science, and how our bodies and minds work, to better understand if there really is a best time to sit down and write. And consider how to structure our day accordingly, so that when life happens, your story does too.

 

According to the Harvard Buisness Review, humans do have a well-defined internal clock that is referred to as the circadian rhythm. This is biologically hardwired, which means that the body does have a preference to levels of peak alertness, or in some cases, creativity and productivity.

For many people, post lunch, energy levels decline and hit a daily low around 3 PM. If you think back to a day when you may have been at your desk working for at least eight hours, you may recall having lunch and then getting gradually more tired as the afternoon stretched on. Some people may call this a food coma if they have eaten a lot, or had too much sugar, and while this can attribute to a relaxed state, the 3 PM dip is a natural phenomenon.

 

After 3 PM, there is a spike of alertness that stretches for 3 or so hours, until what is for many people, a drive home. At 6 PM, energy levels wane and decrease all throughout the night until the next morning, at approximately 3:30 AM. There is a large body of research that backs this theory up, and while some people may be asleep for most of their productive hours, others may note that they are simply not ‘morning people’, or are ‘night owls’. This is a valid observation. It turns out, that some people have reverted patterns in their circadian rhythm. That means that a person who happens to be a night person may earnestly struggle working in the morning hours, and vice-versa.

 

So what does that mean as a writer or someone who wants to write and be creative but also has to spend their best hours at a primary job? I think it is an excellent chance to acknowledge that there are times of day that work best for you as a writer and try to schedule writing time for those blocks. Perhaps it is more effective for you to take four hours on Saturday and Sunday morning and write, than to come home and write for two hours each weeknight. Or maybe you want to wake up one hour earlier each morning, do a short workout, and write for an hour before heading off to work. For a large chunk of creatives still, it is hard to manage any of these suggestions, because you may feel tired all hours, and simply just not have time in your schedule to write at any hour.

 

What then? Many published authors often agree that writing is an exercise in consistency. It is about perseverance in the task of writing. It is about finding the time. For those who must make due during less-than-ideal times to be a writer, you might afford yourself a little extra grace and recognize that your best times are when you are at your day job responding to emails. But fitting the time to write into your schedule, and adhering to it even if it is thirty minutes a day, goes a very long way. On a limited-time budget, you can really stretch those minutes into the best ones if you know and understand your own body and will, and for those of us that can pick and choose our writing times, remember that is a fortune that may not last forever. Experiment with different writing times if you can, and most of all, commit to those minutes or hours regularly, because as a writer, it’s the key to getting your ideas out into the world.